A constellation of eye-tracking measures reveals social attention differences in ASD and the broad autism phenotype.

The study examined many eye-tracking measures at once, and the paper does not name one primary outcome, so some group differences may be hard to interpret. No eye-tracking measure was associated with autism symptom scores or social-cognition scores in the ASD group, so these patterns do not map onto individual severity. Participants were 15 years or older and had IQ scores of at least 80, so the findings may not apply to younger children or people with intellectual disability. The task used only one complex picture and asked participants to tell a story, so the patterns may not generalise to other social situations or passive viewing. Track-loss exclusions removed 5 ASD, 2 control, 13 ASD-parent, and 6 control-parent participants, and the paper reports participant counts in more than one place. Broad autism traits were assessed only in parents of individuals with ASD, not in control parents, so parents cannot be compared across all groups on that trait.

The article lists funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The provided text does not report author conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that eye-tracking can diagnose autism or broad autism traits in a clinic. The differences were group averages from a research task, not validated individual markers, and no eye-tracking measure was associated with symptom scores.